The Galaxy Gear will be announced along with the Note III at Samsung's event.

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We've got good news and bad news. The good news is that we're really getting rolling with this smartwatch craze, with Samsung jumping into the fray in just a week's time. The bad news is that its smartwatch product, the Galaxy Gear, is not anything close to what we've all been picturing.

Rumors about the Galaxy Gear have always been paired with the Samsung patent filing you see above. The idea is that the Gear would finally bring Samsung's flexible OLED displays to the market, which Samsung has been showing prototypes of for about 5 years. This lined up with Samsung's own estimates of flexible OLED production, which was supposed to start sometime in 2013.

The Galaxy Gear hype was getting a little too strong for Samsung, so Lee Young-hee, an executive with the company, recently sat down with the Korea Times to temper our expectations.

The Gear won’t have a flexible display. The new device will enhance and enrich the current smart mobile experience in many ways. It will lead a new trend in smart mobile communications. We are confident that the Gear will add meaningful momentum to the mobile industry.

It sounds like another standard square-brick-on-wrist style smartwatch, not the flexible computer-bracelet of our dreams. Hopefully the world's biggest mobile manufacturer can bring something unique to the watch wars with its first-gen product.

Young-hee did state that flexible OLED is still in Samsung's plans for "future products," so the dream is still alive. You've got to wonder though, is flexible OLED production still happening this year? What will the company use it for if not a watch?

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Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo